Animatic

8.11.16-Groups switched again, I am back to Bermuda with Holly, Siobhan and Ryan. After letting us believe for a day that we miiight have a free week to just work on with colour and develop our worlds, Conánn dropped the Animatic bombshell.

So what even is an animatic?

a preliminary version of a film, produced by shooting successive sections of a storyboard and adding a soundtrack.

-Dr. Google.

So my team, minus Siobhan who has been sick, met around life drawing all day on Thursday to figure out our storyboard and assign parts of the project to each person.

The initial idea was to animate the creation of our world. The scene would open with the sea rising around the Tiki God, he becomes lonely and uses his powers to pull in ships and planes. They gradually pile up and form a planet. We would then cut to the new animal species inhabiting the planet etc. However this idea was quickly scrapped, and rightly so. It seemed too long winded and lacked oomph.

Ryan came up with the idea for a chase scene between the fishmen hunters and Herb, our oversized, lightbulb powered, dino (we feel very strongly about herb.) Holly and I loved this and thought it would be a great way to showcase some of the landscapes within our world as well as the characters. Before lunch, Ryan showed us this clip from King Kong which had greatly influenced his idea, which again, we loved. I loved the dynamic shots and occasional comic relief throughout the clip, as well as the use of a confined space to raise tension.

While the other two went for lunch and life drawing lessons, I began to draw up a very rough version of a storyboard in my sketchbook, which went on to be the main basis of our story, with a few alterations here and there from the team. The input from the others when they came back was great, and really showed me the brilliance of working in a team. With just a few other brains in the mix, a whole pile of new ideas and angles can come about.

Very rough storyboard done, we wrote up a shot list together, considering camera angles, panning, tracking, zooms etc. We also decided that it was best to draw the characters separately from the backgrounds to allow us to manipulate them in after effects more easily.

Here I often had drawn many shots in one, or left out the background as it was the same as the last. Hopefully we will still be able to see the influence of this storyboard in the final one!

The only problem that we had during this process was that we had very different styles of animation in our heads. While Holly and I were thinking of a more Pixar styled approach, Ryan had a more realistic, dramatic CGI idea in this head. Despite this, we worked well as a team and came up with lots of good ideas based on each others suggestions. We also found that we had to stop coming up with new ideas after a while, which meant we didn’t get to include some really nice ideas. We realised that we had very little time to get this done and that a short, simple well made animatic would be better than a badly done complex one.